Although I've used Macs since the late '80s, I'm not the sort of fanatic who sports Apple tatoos and waits in line for Apple-related events. Yet somehow I found myself part of a long line of people on the streets of Manhattan, snaking around the block that is filled by the GM building, stumbling towards a glowing cube of glass, lit from within by a white apple. I blame my wife. She saw reports of previous store openings on the web, and thought this would be interesting. Besides, it was right next to a stop on the subway line we took home every night. How bad could it be? I had a busy enough day at work to keep us from arriving at the store until just about the worst possible moment (shortly after 7 p.m., for the curious). The line was huge. Any hope I had that the start of the Mets-Yankees series would cut down on the opening crowd was misplaced, as it appears that baseball and Apple computers have different demographics.

The Line: We joined the line near its peak length, at Madison and 60th. It wound over to 5th and back on 59th Street, then around the block behind the GM building. This circuitous route gave us an interesting perspective on our wait, as it allowed many views of where we had previously stood and waited. As we hit the line at its longest, we had plenty of opportunity to admire empty sidewalks where we once stood waiting. Sigh. The convoluted path was designed so that the line only needed to cross a New York City street once, where security hired by Apple could make sure nobody was run down by a passing cab. Other security people were arrayed around the GM building, where they kept the area in front of other store entrances and the loading dock clear.

Outside of that block, though, stores were on their own; the Crate and Barrel security guards did not look in the least bit amused about being tasked with keeping their entrance clear. The store employees, however, seemed genuinely bemused by the crowd. Staff from a hotel along the route also poked their heads out a side door to check out the fuss, often looking stunned at the size of the crowd. Several people passing by on foot or in cars stopped to ask what the line was for, and also seemed bewildered by the answer. All of this indicated that, even though New York City is a bastion of Apple usage, it's still a small and self-contained subculture there; this was exemplified by one guy who asked the line if it was trying to get into Crate and Barrel.

Within the line, almost everyone knew why we were there. The exception was a woman who had been dragged there by her teenage son. She wondered aloud whether it might be a generational thing, but that idea was rejected by the grandmother standing nearby. Maybe the truly obsessed, who had already shaken the hand of Steve Jobs and left the store hours earlier, could have done a better job explaining things, but I don't think the crowd near her gave her a satisfactory answer. When her husband showed up, it became clear that she was there on the night of her wedding anniversary, though, so her lack of comprehension may not have been directed towards the Apple store experience, per se, but rather her own place in the evening's festivities.

Overall, it was one of the best behaved crowds I've ever experienced in New York City. This was made clear by the near complete absence of a police presence. Police cars would slow down as they drove past, but their occupants seemed largely unconcerned with the crowd, which is generally out of character for the police. In a wait that lasted over two hours in a largely self-organized line, only one pair of people pushed past in line. That's one of them in the photo on the right; if you know him, feel free to tell him I think he's an ass. As a final insult, we entered the store and grabbed cards to enter the hourly Macbook drawing, only to have that hour's drawing close before we could fill them out.

The architecture: The plaza in front of the GM building used to have an open-air, sunken area which was surrounded by restaurants and shops below street level. This has now been completely closed over with the exception of the area covered by the cube. The only other features in the plaza now are two small fountains flanking the cube on the north and south. The complete absence of plants stands in sharp contrast to the presence of Central Park diagonally across the corner, but is in keeping with Apple's general focus on clean, orderly designs. Living things, other than Apple-approved staff, are apparently a bit too unruly for the Jobsian design aesthetic.

The cube itself is as impressive as everyone says it is. The vast majority of material is glass, including the structural supports, only one of which appears to have a small piece of metal support embedded within it. The remainder of the metal in the structure is simply involved in anchoring the pieces of glass to each other. In the daylight, I was surprised at how obtrusive the vertical glass supports appeared and wondered about the aesthetics of it all. After a lap around the GM building, however, the sun had set, and the glowing Apple suspended within was reflected multiple times by the many pieces of glass. The effect was much more appealing. So, if you're visiting in any part to admire the architecture, I recommend going at night.

Apples everywhere, but most only come out at night.

Inside the cube itself, everything becomes rounded. The spiral staircase of glass is similar in construction to the staircases in other Apple stores, and also constructed to minimize non-glass components. The elevator was also a perfectly rounded tube largely made of glass, perched on a round base made of chrome metal. Even the controls were mounted on a cylindrical chrome pole within the elevator. The machinery of the elevator was deeply recessed below the floor level, such that it was very difficult to find an angle where you could see the bottom of the elevator shaft. Considering the amount of trash that usually accumulates in the bottom of an elevator shaft, I'm sure this was a conscious decision.

Arrayed around the bottom of the entrance was a rounded series of benches. Beyond those, everything reverted to sharp angles, as the floor space was arranged in a roughly cloverleaf area with straight edges. Computers and iPods filled two of the opposite edges on one axis, while the genius area and cash registers mixed with products at opposite ends of the other axis. Going down the rounded staircase left me disoriented relative to the city grid above, which heightened the store's sense of isolation from the bustle of the city. It would be interesting to know whether elevator riders had a similar experience.

A ramp slopes upwards towards what I assumed was the GE building from a side wall near the cash registers; this ramp appears to be the emergency exit, and is marked with appropriately lit red signs. I'm assuming that you can still hear the echoes of the designers gritting their teeth on this ramp at having the break the otherwise clean surfaces of the store's interior with these signs. If there are theaters and/or demonstration rooms in this Apple store, they must be arranged along this ramp, because there's no other place to put them. Overall, the interior seems a bit mundane compared to the spectacular entryway. Returning up the stairs, however, re-established the sense of wonder at the use of glass, and re-introduced you to the city that it's embedded within in a spectacular way.

If there was any weak spot in the architectural design, a possible manufacturing flaw in the cube as it were, it appeared to me to be the cube's flat top surface. New York's been having regular thunderstorms of late, and they left small pools of water on the top of the cube. These will undoubtedly result in the airborne crud that city life produces being trapped by the water and deposited on the glass, which will clearly require some sort of lifting equipment to clean. Fortunately, not enough water appears to pool up to turn the cube into a West Nile breeding ground. It left me with a sense that the folks at the Louvre knew what they were doing when the picked a pyramid.

The shopping experience: Apple had arrayed over a dozen staff members in two lines flanking the entryway. As groups of shoppers entered or exited, they broke out in applause and cheers with remarkable enthusiasm. Either through careful training or via an application of the reality distortion field, the staff of, presumably, New Yorkers was even able to cheer heartily as someone in a Red Sox hat strode towards the entry. They could be heard from at least half a block away, and the cheering crowd was maintained for at least three hours. When given vocal-cord salvaging breaks, the cheerers wandered the line to answer questions, or went back on duty in the store. Smaller groups stood on the landing of the staircase and where it met the floor, giving shoppers further encouragement. In the store itself, the staff was present and friendly, but largely overwhelmed by the huge crowds present at any given time. It was interesting to note that what I had once assumed was a single identity, the genius, was actually part of a trinity. The bar is now separated into three sections, with iPod geniuses on one end, mundane geniuses in the middle, and the new Studio geniuses on the other end, ready to answer questions about media manipulations, especially those performed with Apple software such as iPhoto, Aperture, or Motion. It'll be interesting to see whether Apple decides other stores need a retrofit in order to use a similar arrangement.

The new trinity of helpfulness.

The huge crowds made it difficult to get a sense of the layout of the store. I came away with the impression there was a larger emphasis on computers themselves than at other Apple stores, though this may have been an artifact of the opening days. This may have been exacerbated by the de-emphasis on the remaining PPC holdouts, the pro towers, which had been pushed into a small corner, and a large emphasis on the newly introduced Macbooks. I didn't see much in the way of computer peripherals, such as the large digital camera collections present in other stores. iPods and peripherals were to be had in large numbers, but the huge number of iPod speakers active at one time was distracting and disorienting.

The one purchase I was considering making, an iPod dock, was lost because Apple's normal careful product pricing ladder has not been applied to their peripherals. I could either get a $39 dock that came with an IR receiver, but no remote, or step up to the $99 version, which did have a remote, but also a lot of presumably high quality cables that I had no need for. It may have been time to think third-party solutions—Apple offers many third party iPod accessories that compete with their own—but I was not able to find docks among them, and felt that getting good suggestions out of the shell-shocked staff might be better left for another day.

The huge crush is maintained even as some shoppers leave the store.

I did spend some time admiring the vast expanse of pixels now available on the 17-inch Macbook Pro. Apple views their stores as a way to present their products in a favorable light, but they were apparently unable to keep up with the flood of visitors spending time with their machines that night. The Macbook had enough processes running on it that both of its cores seemed to be running at about 15 percent load. As a result, pulling the power cable left it showing only a little over two hours of battery left, which makes Apple's claims of over five hours in this model seem sketchy. One of the processes running in the background made its presence apparent as I played with the machine. Once a minute or so, something would open a terminal window and execute a Perl script that printed a banner within the terminal window stating something along the lines of "Apple sucks because I didn't win a Macbook in the drawing." I didn't either, but I'm not quite that bitter about it. If I were running the store, though, I think I'd be having the staff at my disposal at 4 am on Monday morning wiping the hard drives clean and placing a fresh OS and software image on them.

The store as a shopping institution: It's worthwhile evaluating the sort of market that Apple's trying to tap into with the new store, especially as some are questioning the expense involved in creating it. I can see at least two audiences, one of which is the tourists. New York has some retail stores that are global institutions. When the dollar drops, travellers from Europe and Asia follow their guidebooks and descend on places like Macy's to take advantage. I've seen organized tours bring busloads of shoppers to an outlet center north of the city. Given that electronics are one of the items that are generally cheaper in the US, Apple is undoubtedly hoping to cash in on that market.

In this light, the location of the store is absolutely fantastic. It's diagonally across the street from an open square at the south-east corner of Central Park, which is a major tourist destination, and is surrounded by nearby bus and subway stops. It's also a short walk north from destinations such as Rockefeller Center and St. Patrick's Cathedral. There's a number of high-end stores in the area, such as Bergdorf-Goodman and Baccarat Crystal. In addition, that entry to the park is frequented by the horse-drawn carriages that make a living based largely on indulgent tourists. By making the store both an architectural and shopping lure, Apple is undoubtedly hoping to be put on the list of tourist stops, and pull in some of the many others that frequent the neighborhood anyway. Keeping the store open while tourists are about in this neighborhood would leave it open well past midnight anyway; at that point, staying open 24 hours isn't as much of a reach as it might sound like.

Exiting the store, and returning to a posh area of midtown Manhattan.

The positioning of the store in a high-end shopping area feeds into the second point, which is that the new store allows Apple to target the second major audience that their computers probably appeal to. By reputation, Apple's computers appeal to two main constituencies: the artistic sort, and the design-centric crowd. More specifically, they appeal to the subset of those crowds who have the money to buy a premium product (N.B.: I fall into neither of these populations, so this highlights the limits of all generalizations). Soho, the location of Apple's other New York City store, was once inhabited by artists, who have since fled the rising rents to Brooklyn. It now attracts a wealthy crowd that considers itself artistically oriented, which means that it's the perfect location for an Apple store. But Apple had to keep that store relatively low-key to fit into the Soho neighborhood. A midtown location, with attention-grabbing architecture, should place it in a great position to attract the design-oriented crowd. The store's neighbors in this area of expensive shopping should make sure that those drawn in have disposable income.

So, overall, I think Apple's decision regarding the location of the store and the expense of dramatic architecture were very consciously chosen to do two things: target their remaining market segment that wasn't previously well served in NYC, and create a architectural and shopping destination that will draw many of those attracted to shopping in the city. If everything goes as planned, the 5th Avenue store will be appearing in travel guides in a multitude of languages and scripts. In the mean time, I'm pretty happy that there's now an Apple store just one stop away from the one I get off on my way to work every day, and even more pleased that New York got an interesting piece of architecture in the deal.